A Reading Programme for Children with Autism, Speech and Language Impairments and Down syndrome

Phonic Decoding in Small Easy Steps

Some children learn letter sounds easily and can readily blend those sounds into words. Others progress well by learning individual letter sounds but struggle to blend the individual letter sounds together to form words. Often the concept is difficult to grasp, or the child may be hampered by a hearing impairment making it harder to differentiate sounds (e.g. “p” and “t” can sound very similar to a child with low normal hearing and/or a speech and language impairment).

Teaching a sight vocabulary and teaching phonics should happen together. In this way the child will be able to use all the tools at their disposal to become a proficient reader.

POPS Phonics can be used to teach initial letter sounds, as well as to help children learn decoding skills. Often this is more challenging than learning sight words, and understandably so, as it involves learning:

• letter sounds
• letter–sound combinations
• the rules governing their use
• the problem-solving skills to determine what rules to use

The POPS approach to this challenge is to break the decoding process into small easy steps, so that a child can be successful in decoding simple CVC words. Characters from the POPS Family feature throughout the pack with Bella and Sam making guest appearances when appropriate. The packs are also designed to stand alone so that they can be used independently of the reading scheme.

Each word family is supported by comprehensive instructions, Word Cards, Large Illustrated Word and Picture Cards, Combination Strip Sentences and Consolidation Strip Sentences.

Sounds and Letters with Clicker 5

Ideally, when teaching your child phonics you need a simple PC program that clearly teaches all the sounds using pictures and plenty of repetition. It is very helpful if the child, teacher and parent can easily record and play back their efforts at making the sounds, making it fun and often prolonging the time the child is willing to devote to the task.

This follows the POPS philosophy of making the task engaging and fun for the child. The Sounds and Letters with Clicker 5 program delivers just that. Because it is sold as an add-on to Clicker 5, it is inexpensive for both the school and the parent.

More importantly, it can easily be customised, like all Clicker 5 exercises, so you can remove or modify any barriers stopping your child making progress. For example when teaching the letter sound “a”, if you though a word used like “ambulance” is too difficult for your child, you just go into edit mode and change both the picture and word to something easier like “ape”.

Especially useful for parents, is the handy and invaluable phonics dictionary with all the 42 letter and letter combination sounds, giving examples of their usage and allowing you to practice making the sounds correctly.

The exercises introduce each letter sound and shape, and children gain synthetic phonic skills by blending sounds to build words. The phonemes (sounds of letters and letter combinations) are presented in groups to enable the teacher to introduce them in structured daily phonics sessions.